Small Claims

• Although most blogs (including this one) are taking today off from Patti Abbott’s “Friday forgotten books” series, some stalwarts have come through, nonetheless. Martin Edwards champions Sic Transit Gloria, by Milward Kennedy. Paul Bishop touts The Pro: The $3-Million Turn-over, by Richard Curtis. Michael Carlson celebrates Interface, by Joe Gores. Bill Crider gives thumbs-up to The Dark Light, by Bart Spicer. And George Kelly has nice things to say about two non-crime-fiction works, both of them collections of John Cheever’s fiction. Most of blogs and Web sites that regularly participate in the “forgotten books” project are expected to pick up the thread again next Friday.

• Another Raymond Chandler biography?

• Bill Crider (Murder in Four Parts) will be this Sunday’s contributor to the CrimeWAV.com podcast series, reading his Edgar-nominated tale, “Cranked.” Stop by CrimeWAV to listen in.

• For Pulp Pusher, Sophie Littlefield talks with Charlie Huston about his self-identification as a “writer of pulp,” violence as a shaping agent of his protagonists, his quote-mark-free dialogue, and his new novel, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. You’ll find their whole exchange here.

• In the course of reviewing Philip Kerr’s excellent new U.S. release, A Quiet Flame, for the Los Angeles Times, Sarah Weinman does a good job of recapping the often-troubled career of Kerr’s series sleuth, mid-20th-century private eye Bernie Gunther.

• The pulp fiction mag Out of the Gutter has begun soliciting submissions for its sixth issue. “This is the ‘Sexploitation’ issue so if you’ve got delicate sensibilities, stop reading now,” reads a news release about the project. “If you don’t have delicate sensibilities, neither do we, and you’re more than welcome to craft a sick, filthy, disturbing--yet ingenious--piece of fiction and send it our way. Get the details by going to www.outoftheguttermagazine.com and clicking Submissions.”

• And enjoy a double dipping of that relatively obscure 1900s author, Joel Townsley Rogers: Cullen Gallagher reviews what’s undoubtedly Rogers’ best-known crime novel, 1945’s The Red Right Hand (“the rare psychological thriller that actually disturbs the reader’s equilibrium”), while the blog Lies! Damned Lies! is impressed--no surprise here--with the salacious paperback cover of Rogers’ 1951 novel The Stopped Clock (retitled Never Leave My Bed), but less won over by the story inside.